If you spent New Year's Eve watching Jool Holland's Hootenanny on BBC2, you have my sympathy. But the highlight of an otherwise tepid show was when a greybearded 55-year-old man in dungarees upstaged Paul Weller, Marc Almond and The Kooks by playing rowdy blues on a guitar with only three strings.

"Seasick" Steve Wold is hardly your typical music star. Born in Mississippi, he literally spent his life on the road, bumming around the USA, living rough, working any job he could find and tanking up on cheap booze.

In between, he became a pretty handy guitar player and busking taught him to keep an audience entertained. "Some people say I'm a bluesman but that ain't true," he joked, "I'm a song and dance man." Now, some 40 years after he ran away from home, this songand- dance man is finally making his breakthrough as a cult recording star.

Steve is a lot more colourful than most recording artists, unless that colour is orange, in which case Girls Aloud have the edge. He plays a selection of guitars but his best known is the Three- Stringed Trans Wonder, a battered old red guitar held together with duct tape.

The story goes that he bought it for $75 from a friend, Sherman Cooper, only to find out Sherman had bought it for just $25 - and he hadn't even bothered to replace the missing strings. So Steve told Sherman he would tell everyone at his shows how he had ripped him off. At this point, the audience choruses: "We know about you Sherman."

But despite the guitar being "the biggest piece of s**t", Steve gets an astonishing sound out of it - all reverb and feedback - and he accompanies himself on his homemade drum machine (a box with a microphone inside).

When it comes to blues, he has plenty to sing about: He jokes about them but many of Steve's experiences are pretty hair-raising, such as being beaten as a child or being arrested for vagrancy and being held for six months without trial.

His blues is raw and dirty, and even if one song is virtually indistinguishable from the next, his shear power and Mississippi drawl carries the audience along.

This show marked the end of Steve's tour and he is returning home to Norway.

So why do they call him Seasick? Well, you try sailing across the North Sea in April.